Proverbs pack great truths into a few well-chosen words, no matter which language you speak. Check out this one from Belize: “Don’t call the alligator a big-mouth till you have crossed the river.” And this truism from Zanzibar:...
It’s a grammatical question that trips up even the best writers sometimes: Is it who or whom? A physician says he likes the sentiment in a colleague’s email signature, but he’s not sure it’s 100% grammatical. The sentence:...
Fess up: do you have a pet name for your car? How about your computer? Martha and Grant discuss the urge to give nicknames to inanimate objects in our lives. Also, why do we speak of vetting a political candidate? And what in the world is a zoo...
John Chaneski’s latest puzzle is “The Yo-Yo Quiz,” and it’s not about famous cellists or first person pronouns in Spanish. The object is to guess the missing word that can be paired with either “up” or...
“It’s raining, it’s pouring.” But what exactly is the “it” that’s doing all that raining and pouring? This question from a caller prompts Grant to explain what linguists mean when they talk about the weather...
Welcome to another edition of the A Way with Words newsletter. What was college slang like 100 years ago? That's what we talked about on the air this past weekend. We also talked about "go fly a kite," nicknames for Vancouver, and why...